Leftist Victory in El Salvador Closes an Historic Cycle

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Monday, March 16, 2009 by Huffington Post
Leftist Victory in El Salvador Closes an Historic Cycle

by Marc Cooper


The apparent victory of leftist candidate Maurico Funes in Sunday's presidential election in El Salvador finally closes out the Cold War in Central America and raises some serious questions about the long term goals of U.S. foreign policy.

With Funes' election, history has come full cycle. Both El Salvador and neighboring Nicaragua will now be governed by two former guerrilla fronts against which the Reagan administration spared no efforts in trying to defeat during the entire course of the 1980's. We will now coexist with those we once branded as the greatest of threats to our national security. Those we branded as "international terrorists" now democratically govern much of Central America.

Funes, once a commentator for CNN's Spanish-language service, comes to power representing the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a Marxist guerrilla group-turned-political -party, an organization that the U.S. government once described in terms now reserved for Al Qaeda and Hizbollah.

From the late 1970's until a negotiated peace settlement in 1992, the FMLN fought a bloody civil war against a series of U.S.-backed right-wing regimes. Those Salvadoran regimes engaged in horrific massacres and deployed savage death squads, taking a massive human toll. While the FMLN also perpetrated atrocities, all independent analysts agree that the overwhelming majority of the 75,000 who were killed in the war in El Salvador were victims of government-sponsored violence. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/16-5

[bertman]

1. Thanks for posting this, marmar. While it is a good sign that there are two leaders of

former rebel groups who have been democratically elected, it may be a bit premature to say an historic cycle has been closed. I will consider it closed when Ortega and Funes have been allowed to stay in office through their full terms of office.

In the article the question is asked "why so many lives were spent and so many billions in U.S. dollars were burned in an attempt to expunge these leftist forces twenty years ago?" The short answer is: 1) that the U.S. needed a training ground for its counterinsurgency warfare efforts and Central America was the perfect sequel to a Vietnamese-type guerilla war; 2) there had to be a counterbalance to the growing leftist insurgencies that had been sponsored by the Soviet/Cuban combo and represented the personification of the "Red Menace" south of our border.

The thirty-year assault on the leftist forces in Central America also bought the corporatists time to implement their alternate plans to deal with the current rise to power of some of the old lefties. How else do you explain Daniel Ortega's conversion to conservatism? Apparently his addiction to power allowed him to become a born-again tool of the right. It will be interesting and instructive to observe whether Funes will be able to implement any meaningful changes given the problems he faces now in the early days of his administration. Thirty-plus years of ARENA-embedded governmental infrastructure will not yield quickly to the forces of social and economic justice.

[Judi Lynn]

2. El Salvador votes away its bad past

El Salvador votes away its bad past

The left's electoral victory put an end to US meddling and proved that Salvadoran democracy is no regional threat

Last Sunday's election in El Salvador, in which the leftist FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation) won the presidency, didn't get a lot of attention in the international press. It's a relatively small country (7 million people on land the size of Massachusetts) and fairly poor (per capita income about half the regional average). And left governments have become the norm in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela have all elected left governments over the last decade. South America is now more independent of the United States than Europe is.

But the FMLN's victory in El Salvador has a special significance for this hemisphere.

Central America and the Caribbean have long been the United States' "back yard" more than anywhere else. The people of the region have paid a terrible price – in blood, poverty and underdevelopment – for their geographical and political proximity to the United States. The list of US interventions in the area would take up the rest of this column, stretching from the 19th century (Cuba, in 1898) to the 21st, with the overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (for the second time) in 2004.

Those of us who can remember the 1980s can see President Ronald Reagan on television warning that "El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts" as he sent guns and money to the Salvadoran military and its affiliated death squads. Their tens of thousands of targets – for torture, terror and murder – were overwhelmingly civilians, including Catholic priests, nuns and the heroic archbishop Oscar Romero. It seems ridiculous now that Reagan could have convinced the US Congress that the people who won Sunday's election were not only a threat to our national security, but one that justified horrific atrocities. But he did. At the same time millions of Americans – including many church-based activists – joined a movement to stop US support for the terror, as well as what the United Nations later called genocide in Guatemala, along with the US-backed insurgency in Nicaragua (which was also a war against civilians).

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/18/el-salvador-election